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The Troubling Truth of Why It’s Still So Hard to Share Files Directly
Last month, a free app called OnionShare was quietly released that lets you simply share files directly with another person without a middleman. The Copyright lobby never wanted it to see the light of day. And here's why.
CDC: Traveling for Business Can Be An Expensive Health Risk
The CDC Foundation, which supports the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has put up a new publication urging business travelers to protect their health when they travel internationally and steering them to resources to help. It’s a smart idea backed by some eye-opening statistics: Cost of a course of malaria prophylaxis drugs: $162. […]
You’ll want to avoid this Steam Sale malware scam
Hackers have decided to take advantage of the massive interested generated by Valve's Steam Summer Sale this season with some digital phishing. While you're still free to enjoy the Steam sale for all its worth, there's a couple of things we'd have you watch out for. You don't want to get targeted by this particular scam, that's for certain. The … Continue reading
Edible Cupcake Wrappers are real: here’s where you buy them
Scientists, put away your chalk - the most important discovery of our time has come to fruition: edible cupcake wrappers. Straight from the folks at Dr. Oetker (whom we must assume is a Doctor in All Things Excellent) comes "Edible Wafer Cupcake Cases". They do exactly what you think they do. Each Edible Wafer Case is "bake stable", which means … Continue reading
‘Facebook Home’ team reportedly dismantled
If you use Facebook Home, we really hope you like your experience, because it might not change much. A new report suggest Facebook has dismantled the Home team, and placed them elsewhere within the company. One move has already had an impact — but maybe not the one Facebook had hoped for. An article in The New York Times notes … Continue reading
Why I’m Waiting for the Moto 360 (and You Should, Too)
At the Google I/O conference this week, the search company showed off Android Wear, the latest Android iteration and the technology that it hopes, will carry it to the top of the wearable marketplace. To help it get the platform there, Google has enlisted the help of three companies – Samsung, Motorola, and LG. All three of the firms have … Continue reading
Aperture giving way to ‘Photos’ in OS X Yosemite
Aperture, Apple's professional photography app, is disappearing. Speaking to The Loop, Apple notes the app will be slipping into the darkness with OS X Yosemite. As they prepare a more robust Photos app, Aperture may just be redundant. The new Photos app will also replace iPhoto, bringing a bit of stability to Apple's photographic endeavors. Rather than have a slew … Continue reading
Fly for iPhone may be the best quick video editor around
Video editing on a small screen can be a pain. Though iOS is closing the gap with ease of use, the smaller display still makes for a headache-inducing ride sometimes. A new addition to the App Store makes things a bit easier to handle, but is it the best editor you can get for your iPhone? Fly does 'simple' perfectly. … Continue reading
Satoru Iwata re-elected Nintendo President in face of loss
This week one "Election of Ten Directors" proposal was passed by the Nintendo board of directors, this including Satoru Iwata as Representative Director, Director, and President. This re-election comes in the face of several months of losses and a general less-than-fantastic outlook for the company throughout the last year. It may very well be Nintendo's high-powered showing at E3 2014 … Continue reading
Android TV gaming controller spotted
Android TV wants to be your living room portal for all things media. From watching movies and TV to Android gaming, Google wants you glued to their version of what media consumption should be. At I/O, gaming was a very strong angle for Google during the Android TV portion of the show. Now we might have our first look at … Continue reading
Watch: this 80’s Game of Thrones trailer cannot be denied
A firm combination of elements made to glorify our love of the vintage has been made this week. A Game of Thrones 80's television program intro video has been constructed from several sources, including the original show and a remixed version of the show's official theme. Below you'll witness the excellence of what could have been. The Game of Thrones … Continue reading
New study shows Nintendo needs to take mobile seriously
A recent study has shown a robust number of kids in the UK own tablets, and that metric increases all the time. Nearly half of kids aged 12 and under own a tablet of some kind. The study also showed that those tablets have eclipsed the Nintendo 3DS as the gaming platform of choice for youngsters. Futuresource Consulting found that … Continue reading
Chromecast pairing without WIFI is doable using ultrasonic sounds
Imagine a gathering at your home. A friend or relative excitedly wants to share a photo or video on your living room TV via Chromecast. Before you've managed to dig out your WiFi password, hand it over, and get the device connected, the magic of the moment is over. That soon will become a thing of the past, however, thanks … Continue reading
iPhone 5s and 5c price drop arrives at Walmart
The iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c are set to receive a permanent price drop at Walmart, with the higher-end model hitting what will likely be $99 with a two-year contract, and the 5c decreasing to $29 with the same contract requirement. The information comes from the folks at Engadget, who claim the price drops should show up at 9AM this … Continue reading
Pacific Rim 2 headed for cinemas April 2017
Pacific Rim and Del Toro fans should mark their calendars as early as now, or first get a 2017 calender in advance. The director has just announced the the sequel to the blockbuster sci-fi hit will be hitting theaters in April three years from now. Oh, and it will be preceded by an animated series as well. Guillermo del Toro … Continue reading
White dwarf star could be Earth-sized diamond
If people here on earth already fight over diamonds, imagine what they would do over one the size of the planet itself. That might actually be what David Kaplan and astronomers from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have discovered, a dead star so cold that it might have crystalized over to become a literal gem in the sky. Instead of going supernova, … Continue reading
FAA scrambles to control consumer drones, but its legal case is shaky
The FAA is in a pickle. For years, the aviation regulator dragged its feet on rules for unmanned aircraft. Now the skies are filling up with a new generation of lightweight consumer drones that are proving popular with everyone from photographers to journalists to search-and-rescue teams — and the FAA doesn’t have the legal tools to deal with them.
In response, the agency has been forced to improvise. This week, for instance, it published sweeping “guidance” for model aircraft operators. Critics, however, suggest this is an attempt to paper over a problem exposed by a recent court decision: that the agency lacks real rules to deal with the drones.
A scramble to assert authority
The FAA’s current predicament is rooted in an administrative judge’s surprise ruling last fall that the agency had no authority to fine a man $10,000 for using a drone to take photographs for the University of Virginia. The decision, which is under appeal, found the FAA had wrongly relied on “policy statements” rather than real rules to justify the fine.
Now there are serious doubts as to the FAA’s power to control unmanned aircraft that operate away from airports or commercial flyways, which has led other drone advocates – including media companies and a respected search-and-rescue service — to file further court challenges.
In response, the FAA has struck back with a burst of legal activity, including a series of “myth-busting” Q&A’s and this week’s “Guidance to model aircraft operators.” The notice, which calls for public comments, sets out a lengthy list of rules, including a requirement that drones must be flown within a direct line of sight.
It also reiterates the FAA’s early insistence that any commercial drone use is forbidden: using a drone to see if crops needs water is ok “for personal enjoyment” but not for farming, and moving “a box from point to point” is fine but “delivering packages to people for a fee” is not. (This last point led media to speculate that the FAA notice was aimed at Amazon’s plans for a drone delivery service).
The FAA is touting the new notice as a helpful set of dos-and-don’ts for unmanned aircraft. The drone community, however, is outraged and is blasting the document as a sham with no basis in law.
The Parrot Bebop drone. Photo courtesy of Parrot.
A future law for today’s drones?
An FAA policy statement from 2007 “cannot be considered as establishing a rule or enforceable regulation” for unmanned aircraft, wrote the judge who shredded the agency’s $10,000 fine last year. In response, the FAA’s lawyers appear to have rummaged through their drawers for a new argument — and found one in the form of the “FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012,” a law signed by President Obama in early 2012.
That law is mostly about upgrading the nation’s air traffic control system, but it also instructs the FAA to develop rules for unmanned aircraft of all sorts. While Congress asks the agency to integrate domestic drones into the national airspace, it also created a clear carve-out under Section 336, titled “Special Rule for Model Aircraft,” which says the FAA is not to regulate certain small drones. This exception describes drones flown by hobbyists that are under 55 pounds, flown away from airports and within the operator’s direct line of sight.
The FAA has now seized on this definition as a magic bullet to address its present legal headaches. Specifically, the agency claims in the new notice that any aircraft not covered by the law’s exclusions falls under its powers.
This sounds well and good but for one thing: the definition from Congress applies to future rules created by the FAA, and the agency hasn’t passed those yet. Instead, the FAA is still plodding through the process of creating those rules, which must get sign off from the White House, and are not expected to be complete until 2015.
“The agency is saying that if you don’t fall into the exemption for future regulations, you're under the current ones. That’s not a logical or faithful reading of the statute,” said Brendan Schulman, a lawyer who is representing drone users in several high profile cases.
Schulman, of course, has an interest in the outcome, but his position appears to be correct: despite the FAA’s huffing and puffing this week, the agency is in the same legal spot that is was in months ago when the judge in Virginia struck down its fine. It has still not made new rules, but is attempting to put a gloss on existing ones that are of questionable effect.
Meanwhile, the FAA’s new definition is already irking manufactures in the model aircraft industry.
“The FAA’s interpretation, which can only be described as a brand new rule, could rock the nation’s hobby industry as a whole,” said Ready Made RC, which makes vehicles and viewing equipment related to consumer drones, in a statement.
An FAA spokesperson said by phone this week’s guidelines are intended to help drone users understand what the law is, but said she could not discuss the legal theory behind them.
Photo by Lee/Flickr
Playing legal chicken with drones
The FAA’s new legal and PR gambit this week is likely to raise the stakes further in an uncomfortable stand-off between the agency on one hand, and the growing ranks of people who see the drones as a valuable tool for industries such as movies, news gathering and farming.
Until last year, the agency relied on sending cease-and-desist letters to bring down drones, but that strategy looks less effective now that companies are challenging them in the courtroom.
In response, the FAA is floating its tenuous new legal theory and raising safety alarms by pointing to “incidents involving the reckless use of unmanned model aircraft near airports and involving large crowds of people.” It is also sticking to its guns of treating most drone operators as akin to plane or helicopter pilots.
While the safety concerns may be legitimate — there have also been incidents at the beach and in national parks — there is still no need for a hardcore crackdown that could stunt what is such a promising technology. A better plan would to be for the FAA to accelerate its policy of granting exemptions, or creating a simple permitting system to authorize unmanned aircraft pilots in defined low-altitude airspace (here’s a guide to that airspace).
By drawing arbitrary legal lines in the sand, the agency risks setting itself up for further embarrassment before a judge. It should instead get on with the job of writing the rules it should have finished months ago.
Unlike Google Glass, Android Wear probably won’t get iOS support
When Google introduced Google Glass, the wearable display only worked with Android phones and tablets. It took some time, but last December Google created a MyGlass companion app for iOS, allowing iPhone owners to get most of the same functionality from Glass as Android users. That’s not likely going to happen with Android Wear, however.
The first clue was when Dave Singleton, Google’s Android Engineering Director, shared more Android Wear details on stage Wednesday at Google I/O. During Singleton’s demo he showed how to order a pizza in under 20 seconds using the EAT24 app, noting that developers could add wearable functions to existing Android apps.
Photo by Janko Roettgers/Gigaom
That means there’s no Android Wear app store like there is for Google Glass apps. In the MyGlass companion app, for example, you can choose apps called GlassWare to install to your Glass device, regardless if you’re running MyGlass on an Android or iOS devices. That’s a key difference.
Indeed, I later spoke with some folks about Google and learned a little more. Apps for Android Wear aren’t really standalone apps at all. Think of them as extended functionality to Android apps themselves. A developer would then add notifications or features for Android Wear through their own Android app. Those wearable bits get pushed to the watch from the Android app through the Android Wear companion app.
Photo by Janko Roettgers/Gigaom
This is a smart move because we don’t need yet another app store for another device. Developers don’t want to maintain different apps for phones, tablets, TVs and now watches. By making the Android Wear components an extension of a traditional Android app, developers can manage everything in one package. And consumers don’t have to worry about keeping their watch apps up to date: The Android app on their phone or tablet that has Android Wear functionality will manage that.
Since Android Wear apps are tied so heavily into Android apps themselves, don’t expect to use Android Wear with an iPhone. At least not anytime soon, if ever: The way Google has engineered this makes it pretty much an Android-only play.
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Twitter details how new home-grown system coordinates data analytics
Twitter has unveiled its new real-time analytics orchestration system, dubbed TSAR (TimeSeries AggregatoR), that will help ease the burden of its engineers. The framework was designed for the purpose of aggregating and automating all the data gathering and calculations of its various analytic systems like Hadoop and Storm into one common framework. With TSAR, as detailed in a blog post, Twitter engineers won’t have to worry about coordinating the actions of each analytics tool as well as allow for different product teams to innovate upon the platform.
While data-management systems typically deal with the problem of sorting out information, they all think about data in different ways. Whereas MySQL stores data in a relational data store, Hadoop, which does batch processing, takes another view of the same set of data so that it can do its own calculations, explained Aaron Siegel, one of the key engineers responsible for TSAR's development. What TSAR does is coordinate how each one of these systems talk to each other so that if a product team wanted a specific bit of information, TSAR could do the heavy lifting of having to figure out which data system needs to do what.
"We want to enable product teams to focus on building their products," said Siegel. "They don't have to think 'Where is my data coming from?' They can just build great products and have the data be available."
Diagram of TSAR and how it fits into Twitter’s infrastructure
Before TSAR, it was an operational nightmare to have to manually orchestrate all the various Hadoop and Storm jobs in addition to other data processes, said staff software engineer Reza Lotun. Essentially, every time a product team wanted certain types of insight into Twitter's vast amounts of data, the engineering team would have to create a custom analytics pipeline to deliver what the product team was looking for. TSAR's ability to automate these tasks dramatically cuts down on this effort.
Here's a sample of what the engineering team had to do before TSAR, as detailed in the blog post:
In addition to simply writing the business logic of the impression counts job, one has to build infrastructure to deploy the Hadoop and Storm jobs, build a query service that combines the results of the two pipelines, deploy a process to load data into Manhattan/MySQL etc. A production pipeline requires monitoring and alerting around its various components and we also want checks for data quality.
The TSAR framework was built on top of the Summingbird system, said software engineer and blog post author Anirudh Todi. While Summingbird provided the computational framework that was essentially a hybrid system in which the batch processing power of Hadoop could function together with the stream processing functionality of Storm, TSAR improves upon the system by making it easier for all the different analytics platforms to communicate back and forth.
From the blog post:
TSAR infers and defines the key-value pair data models and relational database schema descriptions automatically via a configuration file and a job specific thrift struct provided by the user. TSAR automates Twitter best practices using a general-purpose reusable aggregation framework. Note that TSAR is not tied to any specific sink. Sinks can easily be added to TSAR by the user and TSAR will transparently begin persisting aggregated data to these sinks.
Currently, a Twitter engineering team is working on a real-time visualization tool to be built on top of TSAR, said Siegel, and other products are on the horizon.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock user Carlos Amarillo.
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Atheer cancels its consumer virtual reality headset to focus on enterprise
Last December, Atheer put its One augmented reality headset and developer kit up on Indiegogo, where it went on to raise more than $200,000. But as of today, the startup has decided to cancel the development of the consumer-oriented One to pursue enterprise applications.
The decision came after Atheer found it would likely not be able to ship the One headsets until around late 2015, which is a year after the December 2014 date promised to Indiegogo backers, according to CEO Soulaiman Itani. It also experienced far more interest from areas like the oil and health industries.
“Mainly, to our surprise, it came from the enterprise; from automotive companies, which we didn't expect at all, to medical companies, which we thought would be very conservative, … to CAD companies,” Itania said in an interview. “We found that we have to put our 100 percent focus on this market."
Prototype Atheer One and developer kit glasses, as of December 2013. Photo by Signe Brewster
Augmented reality systems like Google Glass have already found adoption in health and other industries, where hands-free headsets can help a doctor keep her hands sterile or an oil rig worker access information without getting equipment dirty. Atheer One demos last year included using an application to scan barcodes, which could be of use to Amazon, UPS and other companies that rely on tracking a large volume of items.
Atheer Co-founder and CEO Soulaiman Itani with an early prototype of Atheer’s glasses. Photo by Signe Brewster
Itani said the decision also stemmed from the huge amount of effort it would have taken a startup like Atheer to raise awareness of the glasses. The company also came to believe the hardware, software and consumer expectations are not quite ready for widespread adoption.
“People are very excited about this but they are not (using virtual reality) yet,” Itani said. “They need some time to adjust and to take it in."
He said the technology will be ready for consumers in two or three years, when it has become more miniaturized and polished. When that day comes, Atheer might pursue another consumer headset.
Atheer will send messages out to people who bought Ones through Indiegogo and its website today explaining that all orders have been canceled and refunded.
“I want to thank them. We're really thankful for all of the support,” Itani said. “They are the ones that led us here to this great opportunity that we are looking at right now."
Atheer’s departure from consumer augmented reality leaves the space dominated by Meta, which crowdfunded its MetaPro glasses last year, plus emerging startups like Sulon. It will have to compete with more established competitors like Epson in enterprise augmented reality.
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Sponsored post: The Dropbox problem and the manager’s dilemma
Many enterprises face the "Dropbox problem" – the unauthorized and unregulated use of consumer-grade file-sync-and-share applications. In fact, 81 percent of line-of-business employees admitted to using such unsanctioned Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, according to a report by Frost & Sullivan.
To avoid risking valuable data, organizations are blocking access to unsanctioned file-sharing services. But this can backfire: Without an alternative, employees may secretly adopt other consumer-grade file-sharing solutions and create a kind of shadow-IT private network.
Shadow IT (the use of third-party hardware without official permission from IT) is a widespread enterprise problem. Alarmingly, 84 percent of Frost & Sullivan's respondents admitted they had "concerns about data privacy when [they] use file-sharing products like Box and Dropbox." Yet, they still used them, anyway. Furthermore, 38 percent of respondents use unauthorized cloud apps because IT approval of requested solutions takes too long.
Unfortunately, when it comes to file-sharing requirements, managers must be middlemen between IT and employees. In-house IT wants to keep its systems under lock and key, but end users want to take the easy, if unauthorized, road to get work done.
How can managers identify and address shadow-IT systems and back channels?
Well, Gigaom Research recently published a report, underwritten by Intralinks. It provides a simple framework managers can use to enable employee freedom and impose the security that meets the standards of even regulated industries. Interested? You can download the report here today.
Shutter is an iOS camera with an unlimited camera roll in the cloud
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to take a photo with your smartphone and finding that its internal storage is full. It’s a surprisingly common problem — and although Google, Apple, and Amazon have tried to crack the cloud photo conundrum, nobody’s gotten it quite right. That’s why StreamNation, a cloud storage firm, has released Shutter, a camera app that promises one thing: Every photo taken on your phone, uploaded to the cloud, for free.
The good news is that Shutter is a very nice app. It has an attractive design, and a very useful photo viewer, with an elegant way of providing photo details such as shutter speed and ISO while browsing. The camera itself is fast but somewhat minimal in terms of options: You can add filters and set the focus but you can’t control shutter speed or white balance or access other photography settings. iOS is opening up its SDK to allow full manual camera controls in the near future, so you could see this change in a future version of the app.
But the important thing about the app is as soon as a photo is taken, it’s uploaded to StreamNation’s servers, which are accessible through a browser or a desktop app. Like Dropbox, Shutter can even upload photos from the camera roll taken by other apps. Shutter locally keeps the last 200 photos taken on the camera and deletes the rest as soon as they’re uploaded. While I would’ve liked to see a feature where the most recent photos are stored on my phone in a lower resolution format, Shutter’s approach is a good compromise to the problem.
StreamNation’s web interface
Currently, I use Dropbox on iOS to upload my photos to the cloud and off my phone. But on a free account, Dropbox limits you to 5GB of storage. Apple’s no better, even with its forthcoming iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Drive, which also has a 5GB free cap. Google’s background upload to Google Plus is very well implemented but still has a total storage cap, and the kind of people who can’t be bothered to clear out their camera roll most likely do not want to sign up for or use another social network. Google Plus stores lower-resolution versions of photos for free, but full-size backups still count against the 15GB Drive allotment. Amazon’s forthcoming Fire Phone offers unlimited photo uploading, but is yet to be released.
The solution to this problem needs to both be free and uncapped: First, because the people it would help most are not interested in paying a monthly or annual rate for photo storage, and second, because with ever-rising megapixel counts on smartphones, regardless of whether the cap is 5GB or 15GB, it’s going to get hit, eventually. Although Shutter doesn’t do everything right, it gets those basics down.
Shutter is a bit of a trojan horse for StreamNation: By marrying a decent camera app with unlimited photo and video storage, it’s hoping to gain some attention for its cloud storage service, which it does charge for non-mobile photo storage over 20GB.
I’ve known people who’ve lost their phones and subsequently lost every photo they had taken in the past few years because they were never backed up. Shutter, which is available on the App Store today, is just simple enough to be a potential solution for them, although it would be simpler if it the exact same app was offered by Apple or Google.
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Want to try Android L but don’t have a Nexus? Use the emulator
Google may have announced a new version of Android at its I/O event earlier this week, but it didn’t actually launch one. You can’t get a phone with “Android L” right now, for example, and Google isn’t pushing that version out to existing devices. Instead, Google made the next version of Android available to developers, much as Apple and Microsoft have done in the past.
On its developer site, Google has downloadable Android L images for Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 devices so that developers can get a taste of the new look for Android, as well as to start tinkering with some of the many APIs that Google introduced. So if you have either of those devices, you can do the same: Install the factory image of Android L. What if, like me, you don’t have a Nexus phone or tablet? Hello, device emulator!
Since I can’t put Android L on my Moto X just yet — I would if I could — I’m setting up Android L in a virtual device on my computer. It’s actually not that difficult to do: You just download and install the Android SDK on a Windows PC, Mac or Linux machine. Once that’s done, you’ll have the tools needed, including Eclipse, which is a integrated developement environment used to create Android apps. Make sure you manually install all of the Android L bits or the emulator won’t run.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to know how to program. Instead navigate to the Tools folder of the Android SDK and run the Android AVD command in a terminal to create a virtual device. You can choose what device you want to simulate here, the hardware it has and how much memory your “device” will have. I had to play with some settings to get this working; for my particular setup, I needed to use enable the Host GPU setting for my virtual device.
Once you have a virtual Android phone or tablet configured, you simply start the device. It may take time — depending on your hardware capabilities — but you should see a fully working Android device on your screen like this.
Now you can kick the tires of Android L without having a Nexus or without taking the plunge of flashing your Nexus with preview software!
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